3. Poolshark
“While I’d never claim I was an expert, I used to be pretty good at pool. My aunt and uncle had a pool table in their basement and my parents, for a variety of reasons, would go over regularly and spend all day there. There was nothing else for me and my brother to do, so we just played pool all day for years. Eventually, we got bored and saw that they had a book on trick shots, so we started doing that for fun.
I never really mastered the tricks, but they made for really good practice in understanding how to get the ball to do what you wanted. So anyway, for my buddy’s 20th birthday, he wanted to go to a pool hall and he invited a ton of people. Then he told me it was going to be a tournament, with drinks for individual games and a 50/50 type of deal for the winner.
He would get half regardless because it was his birthday, and he insisted I attend. We got there, started the first game, and they broke, That would end up being the only shot they got. At the end of it, I just looked at him and said, ‘I told you not to invite me…’
I found out afterward that a bunch of them had never even played pool before and I felt pretty bad, so I took the money and bought everyone drinks with it.”
